The Curiosity Cabinet

Now that Downton Abbey has ended for this season, the husband and I have been looking for other television programs. A few nights ago, we watched Masterpiece's "The Old Curiosity Shop," an adaptation of the Charles Dickens' novel.  It wasn't a very good show even though it starred Derek Jacobi, who was phenomenal in I, Claudius.

The idea of a Curiosity Shop, though, made me think of the hutch in our dining room.  It is a sort of curiosity cabinet.  Despite the fact that we have a house full of "stuff," we don't have a lot on display.  We're not much on knickknacks or tchotchkes or what Alison from The Polohouse calls vignettes.  She sets up such lovely little scenes which she photographs for her blog.  I don't really have charming arrangements of items in our house, mostly because I hate to dust.

A vignette, according to Merriam-Webster, is a brief incident or scene or a short, descriptive literary sketch.  In that sense, our curiosity cabinet is filled with vignettes or, at least, with items that tell stories, if only to me and my family.  Come and look into our curiosity cabinet.


The cabinet itself originally belonged to my husband's grandparents.  He scavenged it from their basement many years ago.  (You can barely see them in the above picture, but there are mouse holes by the drawers.)  He and his father then stripped off the old paint and returned the hutch to "upstairs" quality.  When we brought it to our house, it was intended as a place to store dishes and table linens, but it has become a little like the shop in the Dickens tale, "one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town . . . ."

The hutch is part library:  You can see a collection of Oz books scattered throughout.  They belonged to my father-in-law and his older brother when they were boys.  There is also an old Raggedy Ann book on the top shelf.  Cards and postcards from friends and family are stuck in everywhere.

Let's look a little closer.

Pitchers from art fairs; a soapstone hand, carved by my father-in-law; Easter eggs painted by
various family members; a bouquet of flowers knitted by my daughter in a mug made by my son.

Seashells gathered in Florida; Dutch figure salt and pepper shakers from my aunt's collection in front of a postcard from
Mount Vernon; a sarcophagus carved by my father-in-law when he was a boy in front of a postcard from The Biltmore.

I'm linking to The Polohouse Favorites on the First



and Mercantile Muse.